Foul Means: The Formation of a Slave Society in Virginia, 1660-1740 (review)

In this refreshingly bold thesis, based on prodigious research, historian Anthony S. Parent, Jr., lays bare the "foul means" by which "a small emerging class of great planters with large landholdings and political connections brought racial slavery to Virginia" and "gave America its racial dilemma" (p. 2). Parent approaches his subjects—the heads of Virginia's much-celebrated "First Families"—with the jaundiced eye of a muckraking reporter, eager to expose the fraud, brutality, and corruption of America's original ruling class. One might call this study "The Fleecing of America, 1660-1740." Where an earlier generation of historians, most notably Winthrop D. Jordan and Edmund S. Morgan, characterized Virginia's turn to racial slavery in the late seventeenth century as an "unthinking decision" by middling tobacco farmers, desperate for cheap labor of any origin, Parent puts the blame on a small but powerful "great-planter" elite that began to emerge in the 1680s. These men, he writes, "were not only aware of the moral cost of slavery, but they were willing to pay the price in the formation (one could say deformation) of Virginia society," (p. 265) with reckless disregard for the human consequences.

Foul Means is divided into three thematically interrelated, chronologically overlapping sections. Part I, "Origins," examines the rapid rise of Virginia's great-planter class in the mid- to late-seventeenth century. How did these new arri- vals—typically the "estranged younger sons" of prominent English families—amass wealth and power sufficient to secure their social and political dominance for generations to come? They did so, Parent answers, "by organizing land, labor and trade to serve their interests. They engrossed the land seized from the Powhatans, switched from white servants to enslaved blacks in the labor base, and positioned themselves at the control point in the tobacco and slave trades" ( p. 2). Part II, "Conflicts," explores the challenges to great-planter hegemony posed by "subalterns at home and mercantile interests abroad" (p. 4). Parent attributes the racially discriminatory codes and brutally repressive slave laws adopted by Virginia's planter-controlled legislature to the well-placed anxieties of a ruling elite faced with mounting challenges from below. To thwart revolutionary alliances among enslaved blacks, subjugated Indians, and marginalized whites, the great planters adopted a divide-and-conquer strategy. First, drawing on longstanding European prejudices, they depicted blacks as heathens and savages unworthy of English liberties. Then they played to the race pride of poor whites and Indians who, mindful of their own precarious place in Virginia's social hierarchy, joined in hunting down fugitive slaves and suppressing would-be slave rebellions. Part III, "Reactions," focuses on the planters' turn from brute force to ideology as a means of social control. Adapting the English gentry's patriarchism and the Anglican Church's hierarchical authority to their own purposes, the great planters projected an image of themselves as the divinely chosen leaders of an idyllic plantation society—virtuous, good-natured "fathers," concerned for the spiritual and corporeal welfare of the enslaved blacks and other dependents (white women and children) who made up their plantation households.

A close analysis of primary sources—planters' papers, pamphlet literature, court proceedings, and Colonial Office records—enables Parent to illuminate the class-consciousness of these ruling elites and the many "thinking decisions" that transformed colonial Virginia into a slave society. Ironically, one might conclude from Parent's analysis that the planters had little choice but to defend and promote their "interests" as they did. Their turn to racial slavery as a cheap, replenishable source of labor and a convenient mechanism of social control represented a rational response to changing economic and social conditions and a realistic assessment of their class interests. From this Gramscian-Marxist perspective, it appears that the great planters became ensnared, no...